


Little Luxuries

by Fudgyokra



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Domestic, F/M, Family, Ficlet Collection, Fluff, Friendship/Love, Light Angst, Mid-Canon, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2019-07-15 19:36:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16069880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fudgyokra/pseuds/Fudgyokra
Summary: “A little luxury,” Violet repeated happily, turning the words over in her mind. “We haven’t had much of that lately, have we?”





	1. Lacquer

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Reader,
> 
> Though the following collection of ficlets contains very little romance in the physical sense, I’m listing it under Violet/Klaus for the simple reason that that’s what it was intended to be. The purpose of this is for me to show how I imagine the eldest two Baudelaires begin to realize their intimacy is not wholly platonic. Additionally, I wanted to develop my own personal continuity for use in any future fics I may write about them. If you’re expecting lots of kissing or other such resolutions of romantic tension, then I’m sorry to say you will be severely disappointed, and it is for this reason I suggest you turn back now and find yourself something more suited to your tastes.
> 
> Respectfully yours,
> 
> Fudgyokra.

Although the commonality of beautifying rituals had been around as long as mankind itself, the Baudelaire orphans were not exactly the types to be concerned with them, least of all Violet, who Klaus knew was perfectly lovely even without socially-imposed enhancements. In light of such factors, the surprising and singular bottle of red nail varnish Klaus found beneath the sink in their Aunt Josephine’s auxiliary bathroom was instantly labelled superfluous, a word which here means, “extra or unnecessary.”

Upon further consideration, however, he plucked it from its hiding place and rolled it curiously between his palms. It was a bright ruby shade, likely from Josephine’s more fierce and formidable days and, also, fittingly, reminiscent of their mother. It was admittedly tactless to present it to Violet this way, but her mouth only stretched into a frown for a few short seconds before she accepted the bottle from his outstretched hand.

“You’re right,” she said, smiling fondly now as the memory of their parents dawned upon her with the discovery of this newfound instrument of beauty. “It _is_ like the one mother used to wear.”

“I found it strange because, well, it can’t possibly be something Aunt Josephine approves of.” After a moment of consideration for his words, Klaus’s features twisted into dubiety. “Can it?”

Violet tilted the bottle back and squinted at the ingredient list printed alongside it in tiny, black letters. “It certainly does seem to contain far more chemicals than she would be comfortable with.” She regarded it for a moment longer, then lifted her eyes back to her brother’s. “Maybe she keeps it because of its sentimental value?”

“Wouldn’t she keep it in her safe, then?” Klaus asked, genuine.

When Violet finished processing the thought presented to her, she nodded, handed it back, and said, “At any rate, I don’t think Sunny is going to be interested in wearing it, so you probably ought to replace it before Aunt Josephine returns home and sees you with it.”

For several reasons—in this case, primarily nervousness and an oddly-placed sense of shame—Klaus fumbled on the uptake of their conversation, leading with a curious little laugh aimed at both himself and at the absurdity of his next words, which were: “Actually, I, um, brought it for you. I know it’s not—I know you aren’t the cosmetics type, but I just thought…”

Violet’s scrutiny paired well with her pursed lips but less so with Klaus’s indescribable and unfathomable guilt. Before she could speak, he enclosed the bottle in his palm and iterated, with a sense of defeat, that it was a dumb idea because he knew for a fact she was too busy for frivolities like this, anyway. He received a sweet bubble of laughter in answer, which he was surprised to hear; not less so, the way his fingertips were pried from the flesh of his palm to reveal the bottle in its entirety and then soon thereafter wholly plucked from his grip.

“No, no, actually…you know what? We could use a little break,” Violet said.

Klaus’s answering sigh was very nearly a relieved laugh. His main concern was protecting his sister from overwork, but he possessed a faint sense that this was a little bit for himself, too, only heightened by the fact that he answered her with an offering to do the handiwork for her. He watched as she sat back on her bed and unlaced her boots, the completion of which led him to his next assertion: “It’s never inopportune to have a little luxury.”

“A little luxury,” Violet repeated happily, turning the words over in her mind. “We haven’t had much of that lately, have we?”

“No, we haven’t,” he agreed. Though he was by no means an artist (preferring, in fact, to think of himself as a scientist), Klaus was nothing if not meticulous, a word which here means, “very attentive to detail, especially when it came to the satisfaction of his elder sister.” He kept a firm grip on Violet’s ankle with one hand and the dainty brush in the other, lacquering her toenails with short, precise strokes.

He was so focused that he didn’t even notice Sunny crawl into the room until she makes her presence unmistakably known with a burst of nonsensical words that loosely translated to, “You two look just like mother and father.”

Klaus, from where he sat on the carpet in front of the bed, looked up the length of Violet’s undressed calf, to the expanse of her dressed thigh, and then up to her eyes. “Yes,” he agreed, perhaps a little morosely, as he finally looked back down at Sunny. “I suppose we do.”

Violet, too, appeared troubled by her sister’s assertion, but there was nothing more to be said about it, and so she remained silent while Klaus switched dutifully to her other foot. This didn’t stop her from thinking, in no uncertain terms, how it was far too dark in the bedroom for this type of activity, and how it didn’t seem to matter when there was the ever-looming reminder that they may never get the chance to do something this intimate and mundane again. Ultimately, the room seemed darker to her after the thought occurred.

Sunny garbled something that Violet took to mean, “What’s wrong? You look awfully sad. Perhaps you don’t think this color suits you?”

With both siblings now eyeing her cautiously, Violet relinquished her worry and shelved it for another time. For now, she allowed herself to indulge in what little she can appreciate at this chapter in her life and answered, earnestly, “I’m just happy we get to do this.”

Klaus retracted his hands and smiled appreciatively at his work, and, likewise, Violet flexed one foot and admired the shine with a somewhat wan smile. “Just like Mother’s,” she said, “when Father used to paint them for her.”

A smile shared between two siblings is often a very good thing, but in the context of their lives, there were few very good things to be had, and when Violet found her sad smile being mirrored back at her from where Klaus was knelt on the floor at her feet, there was something they shared that felt an awful lot like a dreadful acceptance—as one would accept their pet fish had died, or that they’d just received a strikingly awful haircut. Something shared, indeed, even though neither of them breathed a word about it.

Violet supposed they didn’t need to; as with many things between them, it simply _was_ , and for now, she was okay with that.


	2. Lukewarm

For most people, a luxury would be receiving a fifty-dollar manicure, or dining in an expensive restaurant. For others, it might be a hot bath for the first time in so many days, or a meal not created out of stale, cold elements. As for the Baudelaire orphans, the latter options were not only luxurious but extremely rare, though at one point in time that had not been the case.

In the triad of days they lodged with their Aunt Josephine, the Baudelaires learned the value of both small mercies—that is, reprieve from Olaf's sinister clutches—and of smaller pleasures in life that they had previously taken for granted.

The moment Josephine walked out the door to head to the market, the three children treated themselves to a hot, stove-cooked meal by candlelight.

"Perhaps we shouldn't be doing this," Klaus suggested what they all already knew, though the tenor of his voice was very pleased and not at all indicative of the guilt he supposed he should have been feeling at disobeying their guardian's will. He lifted a spoonful of blissfully warm soup to his lips and slurped it with all the abandon of a child who'd not had a hot meal in days, which was precisely correct, in their case.

Across from him, her face illuminated a warm orange by the candle flames, Violet smiled. "Isn't it wonderful, though?"

Beside her, Sunny chirped an emphatic agreement around the cracker she'd halfway obliterated with her teeth.

"It is," Klaus assented, setting his spoon down into his empty bowl and running his clammy palms up and down the lengths of his sleeves. "If only it weren't so cold in this house, then it might be perfect."

Immediately, Violet's face lit up. In this case, though the tiny dancing flames literally lit her face from afar, the phrase "lit up" in this context was entirely figurative, in that it meant she was suddenly struck with a brilliant idea.

"I have a brilliant idea," she said as she stood from her seat and dragged a large pot into the sink. She turned on the tap, let the water run to her satisfaction, and carried it to the stovetop with practiced care.

"Violet?" Klaus inquired, lost in the flutter of her skirt above her newly-painted nails, and how he knew Josephine would flip if she ever noticed. Violet was careful to hide the color with her boots in their Aunt's presence, because none of them were sure how the woman would react to the prospect of chemical makeup, or the idea that Klaus was so talented with it, despite being a young boy.

It took him a second to realize his sister was looking at him now with a funny smile on her face, and he couldn't help but feel a little strange at the previous aim of his gaze and his thoughts alike. "You did a good job," she said, lifting her foot and flexing it as though admiring his handiwork once again.

"They're pretty," he answered, then wrinkled his nose at the curious compliment.

Violet's appraising smile down at her feet, then back at him, was a fine enough answer enough for him, anyway.

She turned back to the pot on the stove, which, from the sound of it, was steadily coming to a boil. Klaus was watching Sunny munch on a raw cucumber when he finally had to ask, "What do you plan on doing with so much hot water?"

There wasn't a response until Violet had padded out of the kitchen and was already well into the hallway, where she gave the answer over her shoulder. "I'm running a  _real_ bath."

One of many problems with Aunt Josephine, as beloved as she was by the Baudelaires, was that she did not allow hot baths in her house, just as she did not allow the heater to be turned on, or the stove to be used. Her intense fear of heated water was only paralleled, in fact, by her fear of  _cold_ water. As she would say, hot water could burn you, but cold water could give you pneumonia.

It was because of her inclination toward lukewarm soaks that Violet had the idea she did, leading her to their small, shared bathroom with its regal, claw-footed bathtub, which she presently fitted with its plug and began to fill with pot after pot of hot water. For the first time she'd ever seen it, the bathroom mirror fogged, and Klaus, as he surfaced behind her, couldn't help but laugh at the smiley face she drew on it with her finger.

Laughing along was as much a pleasure for her as it was for him, but when it stopped, her brows knitted together in such a way that for a split second of panic, Klaus thought he might have done something wrong.

What Violet said, however, was unrelated to him but to a certainly-looming deadline. That is, whenever their Aunt returned, which was bound to be soon, they would have to give up their pursuit of a warm bath. In this case, it meant there would likely only be time for one.

Klaus pursed his lips and said with earnestness, "You and Sunny can have it. I'll be okay."

Violet made a similar face and replied, "But you were the one shivering. You should have it."

There was a long drag of silence, and then, inexplicably, Violet faced him with a soft smile and spoke the words floating in Klaus's head aloud, so similarly-worded that he feared for one irrational moment that she could somehow read his foolish, foolish thoughts.

"Well," she said, gently, carefully, "we could always share."

Her words quite handily obfuscated his own, meaning that what came out of his mouth was a wholly unintelligible jumble of nonsense more befitting of their baby sister than of a scholar like himself. Instead of laughing at him, though, Violet smiled that sad smile like the one they shared the night before and grasped one of his hands between both of hers. "Don't worry," she offered, unhelpfully, "we used to take baths together all the time. This is no different."

"I can think of at least two significant things that makes this different from when we were little, Violet," Klaus managed to stutter in disbelief. Whether the sudden fog of his glasses was from the bathroom's menacing heat or from his own face, he couldn't be sure.

"Well," began Violet, careful again as she tiptoed around her vocabulary to avoid saying the wrong thing, "I suppose society would consider it strange, but…"

"You know I don't care about that," Klaus replied with a scoff. When Violet smiled at that, he got the sense that he'd given the precise response she was looking for, and, with that in mind, he swallowed an unbidden lump in his throat and agreed by way of the words, "Bring Sunny, then."

Klaus undressed in the silence of his own contemplation, setting the neatly-folded pile on the back of the toilet, with his folded glasses perched on top. To have hot bath water was incredible, if a bit much for the sensitized skin that hadn't felt it in what seemed like ages. It was so pleasant, in fact, it drew from him an equally-pleasant sigh that in turn encouraged him to close his eyes.

Seconds later, the door shut with a click. He dragged his knees toward himself to give his sisters room. There was a moment where he just stared at the water, watching it ripple in the space between his chest and stick-thin thighs. He could hear the sound of Violet shrugging her dress off of her shoulders—could hear the rustling of soft cloth against skin on its way to the floor. For reasons he felt rather ashamed of, he found himself holding his breath in apprehension for the moment when the water's surface was broken, rippling with the disturbance of new weight being added to the tub.

Violet sighed much in the same manner as he had, and Sunny giggled excitedly before bringing her tiny hands down on the water's surface in a series of loud smacks.

Without even thinking about it, Klaus smiled the smile that showed all his teeth and tilted his chin down to look at her. It was wonderful seeing her so happy, especially after everything they'd been through. If he'd been of better conscious, he might have pondered, as he had many nights before, whether or not she'd remember any of these unfortunate events in their lives. Instead, his errant eyes darted automatically past Sunny's head, which achieved nothing but an eyeful of Violet's pale knees, then ashamedly the few inches it took to come up to her face.

She was smiling back at him in what appeared to him like amusement. At that moment, they were all bared to the world in physicality and in emotional vulnerability, and he felt most of the nerves fade away.

"She's happy," Violet said. She was no fan of pointing out the obvious, but it was something they were both pleased to say and to hear.

Klaus looked back at Sunny's face, raised a finger, and poked her playfully on the nose, which, as it tends to do with young children, made her laugh again as if it were all quite hilarious. He felt a little laugh of his own build up, which Violet joined. Then, suddenly, they were all just  _laughing._

He never thought it would feel so good to laugh again, but the way things had been going, he could honestly say it felt good. Better, even, than a nice, hot bath.


	3. Lawful

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Valentine's day, all!

“Do you remember when we were little, and we used to play house with the neighborhood children?”

As Klaus had feared, Violet’s initial reaction was the raised brows of her curious nature coming to bite him for asking. Pleasantly enough, to conceal her prying, she replied, “I don’t remember the specifics...”

Though not overtly a lie, Klaus felt instantly more ashamed of his question just by his older sister’s avoidance of it, even if he knew she wasn’t trying to dissuade him from asking but merely wanted to know why he’d brought up such a seemingly out-of-the-blue subject. In this context, the phrase “out of the blue” refers to something previously unmentioned in a conversation. When Klaus asked a question about their young childhood, it was as strange to Violet as it was frightening to himself, who had certainly _not_ pulled the thought from out of the blue. Quite contrarily, he’d been spending a long time deliberating whether it would be a good idea to ask.

After audibly clearing his throat, he began again. “What I mean is, I’m quite certain we played it, as—as most children do, and it happens to be all about subscribing to normative ideas of what a household—”

“I know what it is, Klaus,” Violet interrupted. She did not do so to be cruel, but to discourage rambling, as one would do to belabor a suggestion they weren’t certain they wanted to make, perhaps due to a fear of rejection. “What does that have to do with us?”

Klaus tried to avoid gesturing outlandishly as he spoke, but it became harder to do with each passing word. “When children play house, there is, ostensibly, the role of the father figure and the role of the mother figure. They do things for the younger kids like pretend to dress them or cook for them, and then they assume their spousal duties by kissing and going on about their day, perhaps to a job or to a beloved hobby.”

Violet’s brows rose infinitesimally higher on her forehead, rerouting Klaus back to the simpler version of his question with a defeated shake of the head and a growing flush. “Wouldn’t you say, based on what we achieve in our day-to-day lives for Sunny and, well, for _ourselves_ that we…”

His sister cocked her head, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and pursed her lips thoughtfully. There was some dissonance in her eyes, meaning Klaus had to take it upon himself to speak the words he felt too terrified to get past his vocal chords. After another agonizing swallow, he said, “That we fulfill the role of Sunny’s parents?”

Violet’s lips turned downward just enough to make Klaus think he’d said exactly the wrong thing, but the way she looked down at her lap and idly twiddled her thumbs felt like a different sign. Even for Klaus, proud of his skills in situational analysis, the conflict in gestures was hard to interpret.

“Sunny remembers our parents,” Violet said at last. Klaus could sense his sister wanted to say more but abstained, a word which here means “kept quiet for the sake of not hurting her brother’s feelings.”

The silence between them felt oppressive and was broken only by a sudden interjection on behalf of Sunny, who seemed to arrive from out of thin air and thus scared the breath right out of Klaus’s lungs. Violet echoed his surprise with a small jump of her own but was still the first to recover. “Oh, Sunny,” she offered kindly, “come here, would you?”

Klaus watched as Violet hefted the toddler onto her hip and carefully avoided looking straight at her as she asked, “Sunny, you remember Mother and Father, don’t you?”

When Sunny turned her head toward Klaus, he felt strangely exposed by his thoughts until Violet interrupted their shared look with the words, “Of course you do. If not, surely you’d tell us?” Her uncharacteristic nervousness floored Klaus, who was far more accustomed to being the nervous one among them. In response, he placed a hand on Violet’s shoulder. Her eyes, wide and shiny, snapped back to his, but he did not make a move to let go. She did not ask him to.

After a moment, Sunny offered a small coo that sounded an awful lot like, “Mama,” which dragged both of her siblings’ attentions to her with twin jolts of surprise. Klaus’s eyes immediately drew to Violet’s lips, parted in a soft gasp he could not quite gather the meaning of, whether good or bad.

For a frozen moment in time, he could live in his fantasy world: Watching Sunny twist in Violet’s grip and speak the word _mama_ like a summons instead of an answer to her question. With the way Violet looked at him, sad eyes shining, he was beginning to think she shared his sentiment. His heart thumped painfully behind his ribs, but he admitted to his point with a whisper of near-reverence: “I suppose what I’m saying is that I desire a traditional family unit…with myself in the place of the father-figure.” Especially if that meant Violet would act as the mother. Even if that was _wrong._ “I just wondered if we could _try_ that. Being a real family, I mean.” Out loud, the words sounded shameful. They _were_ a real family—Klaus knew that. He expected Violet to call him out on his word choice, but, to his surprise, she instead nodded and swallowed hard.

“Sunny,” she began again, holding Klaus’s gaze with a peculiar kind of intensity, “could you ever…” She paused, a flicker of pain crossing her face. Klaus wanted desperately to erase it, maybe with a kiss. He wondered if she’d allow it. Finally, she finished, “Could you ever see us as your parents?”

Somehow, Sunny seemed to read the mood shared between them, if not the thought itself, because she uttered a meek, “Dunno,” that sounded far more definitive to Violet than it did to Klaus, because she sighed and shook her head like it had been silly to ask in the first place. When she looked back at him, he wished—not for the first time this month, this week, or even today—that he could turn back time. To take back the question he had asked without a single regard to how it would break his sisters’ hearts.

Violet’s eyes looked so full of _want_ and yet Klaus had chosen, with ill-timed curiosity, to derail the fairytale that perhaps they had both been living.

Violet set Sunny down and watched her pad off to a nearby room, intentions unclear. The moment she was gone, the remaining siblings spoke in unison, ready with their words in a way they hadn’t expressed in so long they were cruelly reminded how uncertain their lives now were. At the same time that Klaus blurted, “I’m sorry,” Violet said, “I’d like for us to be like Mother and Father.”

When a sudden and tense silence befell them, everything seemed loud and inescapably meaningful. Even Klaus’s quiet, “Are you sure?” seemed to hold more merit than the innocent question suggested.

Violet grasped her brother’s hands and said, “I’m sure.”

The moment marked Sunny’s reemergence as she crowded her way between her siblings’ feet and held out one of her tiny hands. In it was a photograph, depicting their aunt and her husband happily locked in an embrace. Josephine wore her wedding dress, and Violet seemed to understand what their sister was articulating before Klaus could even reorient himself in the present.

“Oh, we can’t,” she said sadly. “We can’t get married. We’re—” Violet paused, looked at Klaus all aglow with something like awe, and finished meaningfully, “we’re only children.”

Of course, Klaus knew that one day they would have to explain the law separating them. The repercussions both legal and societal were too much to expound upon, even for someone of their sister’s intelligence. Enough about it hurt without having to look upon Sunny’s disappointed face, but Klaus tried to soothe the wound by lifting her—picture and all—into his arms. Cradled against his chest, Sunny relaxed, and Violet gave them both an appraising smile that struck down to the marrow. “Maybe one day,” she said, and Klaus absorbed the lie with a wan smile.


	4. Lightning

A timid child by nature, Klaus had a fear of public speaking.

Of course, a great many people in the world share this fear, which is really quite reasonable, as speaking in front of a large crowd is an unpleasant experience for both the speaker, afraid of rejection or making a mistake, and for the audience, afraid of having to endure a dull speech on a subject in which they have no interest. Klaus would rather sit amid the audience, even if he’d been hoping for a grand lecture on a popular Russian novelist only to find that he’d stumbled upon a seminar for lawmaking processes.

The idea of having to deliver a speech of any kind made his knees want to knock together and his pulse want to spike. Even thinking of it now made him rather clammy, a word which has nothing to do with bivalve mollusks who dwell in the sand of the ocean floor and instead describes a kind of cold sweat one descends into when they are panicked or ill.

As much as he loathed it, he would trade his current predicament for a theater stage in front of the most packed auditorium he could find, with a speech duller than a butter knife scribbled onto the cue cards he held in his sweating palms.

For the third time in as many minutes, lightning lit up the inky sky, followed by a tremendous crack of thunder, and Klaus’s breath hiccupped out of his chest. He pulled the bedcovers up higher, unsure of what to do with himself in the absence of sleep but to think about how childish he felt for being afraid of something so seemingly inconsequential.

Unlike thunder, which is fairly harmless, lightning was capable of destruction and even death. The accompanying boom, to Klaus, held not a candle to the threat of superlunary electricity, capable of starting fires and stopping hearts in equal measure. Burning and jolting, to no favorable end. He was not a fan of thunder, either, but the fear in that laid solely with the knowledge it meant lightning had preceded it, silent and ominous as it struck its deadly path across the sky.

Another bolt turned the world outside his un-curtained window white for a split-second, and his heart stuttered with the phobia that Josephine’s house was hit by it, sure to be annihilated on its flammable stilts overlooking the messy waters stirring restlessly below. Through the raindrops on the pane, the light seemed that much more jarring.

Silently, he dropped his feet to the cold wooden floor and crept into Violet’s bedroom. His sister stirred beneath her blanket as she sat up to look at him.

“I’m sorry if I woke you,” he said after a long moment of gathering his tremulous voice. He did not want speaking to Violet to be as frightening as making a grandiose speech, but the daunting world of tear-stained cue cards and blasts of beastly light seemed impossibly closer when he had to acknowledge it. “I was…afraid.”

“Oh, Klaus,” his sister said, “you didn’t wake me. The storm did. I know you’re not very fond of them, either.” She put it kindly, which he felt must have been to preserve his ego. Even if he did not have much of one, it was something he liked to hold onto—that he could be brave in the face of danger and not weep like a child at a storm. He was grateful for it.

“Yes, you could—you could say that.”

“Would you like to come to bed with me?” The words hung in the air, dangerous and evocative of a conversation they’d certainly not be having any time soon, if ever. Klaus knew better than to think of the entendre, likely unintended, and the fact that he _had_ made his face burn bright with shame. Turning Violet’s words into something crass should have been the last thing on his mind.

Her window lit up white, and Klaus’s pupils shrank, derailing all other thoughts to the tune of a whimper he was loath to admit came from him.

“I would,” he agreed, finally, pushing aside both the implicit nature of his sister’s question and the antithetically childish image it actually made once he crawled into bed beside her, allowing himself to be blanketed with a graceful sweep of her arm. The mix of pleasant childhood memories stirring with the unseemly guilt in his stomach did little to make his queasiness from fear subside. He felt an intense need to say _something_ that could make this normal, even if he knew it to be something unachievable.

Violet was the one to break the silence. “We could try something to take your mind off of it.”

That time he was sure she was being purposefully coy, given that he couldn’t miss her smile, small and reserved but still visible in the dark. That is, before her teeth found and worried her bottom lip, as if her face was now the one to burn, embarrassed.

Words began to bubble to the surface before his own lips could impede the process and so, dumbly, he said, “We shouldn’t.”

Violet’s eyes flickered to the door, then back to his face. “I know,” she whispered, “but don’t you want to try?”

Without hesitation this time, Klaus offered an emphatic—if breathlessly stammered—“Yes, I do.”

He almost questioned how she’d known exactly what he’d been craving, but the moment her lips met his, the question seemed ridiculous: She knew him, and what was more, she knew they wanted the same thing. For how long, he couldn’t bring himself to ask, but it hardly seemed to matter now.

In spite of all their knowledge and all the torment they’d been through, for once something was out of both their grasps equally. Whatever movement Violet bravely pioneered, Klaus clumsily mimicked, and yet, the moment his tongue probed the seam of her lips they were in uncharted territory—a phrase which here means “Something neither of them had ever done with another human soul.”

Klaus knew without asking that his sister had pressed the most chaste of kisses on a neighbor boy they’d once known. She had not known he was watching, or that he’d kissed him too, after the fact, just to get a taste of the love she’d bestowed upon him.

This was very different, needless to say, both for the obvious fact of her gender and the more pressing matter of her relationship to him. Even past that, the way she urgently probed her curious tongue back against his, knocking awkwardly against his teeth in the process, was so different from his meager expectations that it drew a shameful gasp from his throat, which Violet echoed with such vigor he could have quite happily melted on the spot with few regrets.

Just as quickly as it began, it ended.

Lightning flashed once more behind the windowpane, wet with raindrops that lit up like a thousand gems. His heart still felt as though it skipped a beat, but this time it was hard to discern whether it was birthed from fear or from something entirely different.

Violet looked at him curiously, lips still parted. Past the patter of rain, he could hear her breathing shallowly.

Another flash signaled the storm moving closer. Klaus barely caught the shine of it, however, because his sister dared in that moment to touch his chest over his sleep shirt and kiss him again, with a kind of gentle insistence that made him forget why he’d ever be afraid of something as silly as a storm, when he had her around.

“Thank you,” he whispered as his eyes searched her face. “Do you think I could sleep in here tonight?”

Violet smiled at him again, the soft smile that was almost sad, and answered, “I’d like it if you did.”


End file.
